Terrebonne works to ease oil spill-related social issues

As the social impact of oil spill starts to weigh more heavily on families affected in the Gulf, some local organizations that serve Terrebonne, Lafourche and St. Mary parishes are pulling together to lend a hand.

“This is not a maybe, this is not a ‘it might reach this beach’ – this is going to happen, and our mental health is bursting at the seams right now,” said Terrebonne Parish councilwoman Teri Cavalier.

“The effect that we are going to see in the next six months is that we’re going to have an increase in crime, in suicide rate, of children without fathers,” said Cavalier. “They don’t have work so they’re going to leave to find work or because they can’t handle the pressure. “We are going to have an increase of every social ill associated with this, and it’s an area that nobody else is even looking at.”

In order to attack some of the psychological and social woes that are seemingly inevitable due to a disaster with an unknown end, organizations like the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) and Louisiana Spirit are getting mental health programs in motion.

“Louisiana Spirit will be in our area for the next 2 to 3 months but eventually they will disband and it will be our responsibility to care for our neighbors,” said Lisa Schilling with DHH. “So we decided to meet with local providers to start to figure out how to link together to produce mobile teams to go to the bayou.”

Schilling also said the Louisiana Spirit program had deployed stress managers and case managers to go out into the affected communities door to door, and had asked DHH to help with the response.

But many families are reluctant to open up to social workers that show up on their doorstep.

“We realize a lot of these people are not going to come to us for services, so we need to make them more comfortable,” said Schilling.

Luckily, Pam Trowbridge of St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Houma came up with a program that is faith-based, that originated in Miami.

“It’s a program that comes out of Baptist Health Center that was started by Chaplin’s office and created with psychologist Theodora Tarr,” Trowbridge said.

“It is designed to help people deal with any kind of loss, and we take people from local congregations and do a 16-hour training so they can be facilitators for group discussions on what’s going on in people’s lives,” she said.

St. Matthew’s has already identified seven other churches in Terrebonne and a few in Lafourche and St. Mary parishes that are interested in being a part of the program, and it is still on the look out for more.

“It’s been a very successful program, and 250 churches are involved in the Miami area, and we should have the first group up and running in August,” said Trowbridge.

According to Trowbridge, Tarr will be putting her practice in Miami on hold for a few days to fly down to south Louisiana and help with the two days of training, pro bono.

“After the facilitators are trained, the group would gather one or two nights a week and have coffee and dessert and talk about what’s going on with people who can help them with what they are feeling,” Trowbridge explained. “These facilitators are also trained to refer people if they need professional help, but not everybody needs it. Sometimes we just need to get out of our blues.”

The faith-based program has limited funding for the training to be implemented, Trowbridge explained, and anyone is welcome to contact St. Matthew’s to enquire about donations. Other churches that are interested in participating are also encouraged to contact St. Matthew’s.

“St. Matthew’s has taken it on as a project that they feel very strongly about,” Trowbridge said. “It’s better than talking to a social worker, because more people are willing to talk to church members.”